career advice

In January 2008, a reader (Serious Scientist) sent me a query about dealing with inlaws who thought she should give up on her scientific career when her baby arrived. They wanted her to go to a baby shower across the country, without her husband, and she was dreading the trip and the questions and judgements that would certainly arrive during the party. I encourage you all to look back into the archives and read her original letter, and the wonderful advice everyone offered to Serious Scientist. Serious's letter, even buried back in the archives, has generated a couple of recent comments.…

ScienceGrandma pointed me to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It's titled "So You Want to Be a Professor?" but I think it should have been called "The Perils of a Ph.D." The article begins by citing some examples of graduate schools that are reducing admissions of PhD applicants for next year, in what may be a cost-cutting move. As we all know, graduate assistantships cost $25K or more per year, even if the grad student doesn't see much of it and returns those costs to the university by teaching labs, grading papers, and doing other grunt work. Apparently, some universities…

New blogger Mrs. Comet Hunter is in the latter stages of her Ph.D., and she's at the stage of trying to figure out how to break her work out into discrete publishable chunks. She recently wrote a post about the topic, and she sent me an email to ask some related questions. With her permission, here's the bulk of the email: Dear ScienceWoman, I've been reading the Sciencewomen blog for a couple of months now (I know, I'm new to the blog thing) - and find it very interesting! I especially like your shoe posts, and "Ask ScienceWoman". I have a suggestion for an Ask ScienceWoman topic: how to…